Case Study | The Old-Fashioned, Wisconsin Style

Case Study is a bimonthly posting on all things alcoholic by Toby Cecchini, T’s spirits columnist.

Your past always catches up with you. Growing up in Wisconsin, I had an ingrained awareness — and disgust — of the state’s insular signature drink, the brandy old-fashioned. It was what people drank before and after football games or ice fishing. I considered it insipidly sweet and townie lowbrow, and I left before I was enough of a drinker to be proven otherwise.

On a swing through the southern part of the state on bike last week, however, I’ve had to confront this cocktail demon over and over. I found it not only exactly all of those things, but hearteningly so. It’s a Wisconsin artifact that still holds pride of place in old-time timberline culture, alongside muskie fishing, deer hunting and the Friday-night fish fry at the supper club.

Much has been made of the badger state’s capacity for brandy — and I use that term loosely, to encompass some fairly dubious cousins, like the favored blackberry. Korbel is as fancy as it gets in these parts. Every bartender here knows the drill: a bar spoon of sugar, three dashes of Angostura bitters, a lightly muddled slice of orange, a slug of brandy, lots and lots of ice, a splash of soda and, of course, a bright red maraschino cherry, often with an extra dose of the fluorescent juice that they swim in.

I tried making a few high-toned versions with cognac and fresh juice, ginger simple syrup and several kinds of bitters, swapping in French sparkling lemonade, and was duly punished for my hubris. This drink has been around long enough that it defies too much streamlining as handily as it does all of your efforts to dislike it. Yes, it is sweet, and yes, the mild domestic brandies that reign in Wisconsin — not to mention the embrace of commercial sodas — would make cocktailians shriek.

But considering it a simpleton’s drink was my mistake. It’s more a family of drinks, revolving around a central theme. There are four main ways to order it: sweet, with 7 Up; sour (which is not), with sour mix or Squirt; “press” with half 7 Up and half seltzer; or seltzer only. There are regional garnish customizations using pickled vegetables — including mushrooms, asparagus, cucumbers, tomatoes, brussels sprouts and olives — that seem counterintuitive until you taste the salty, vinegar tang playing off of the spice of the bitters and the sweet thrum of the brandy. By God, our great-grandparents were on to something.

No one lays claim to this drink, though some link it to German immigrants who brought back a fondness for Korbel brandy from the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It has evolved into an almost unrecognizably passing relation to the classic rye old-fashioned. And while few people outside of the state have ever heard of an old-fashioned made with brandy, few within its borders are aware the drink is made any other way. Although my home experiments showed that it disliked gussying, The Tornado Steak House — a snug, pine-paneled revival of a venerated old steakhouse just off Madison’s Capitol Square — concocts a spot-on version using fresh lime and lemon juices and a bouquet of house-cured vegetables that showcases the drink’s sweet/sour interplay.

The brandy old-fashioned isn’t a drink I’m going to be mixing up for friends anytime soon. But slumped on a stool in a supper club on the shore of Lake Waubesa, aching from the day’s struggles over roller-coaster hills and waiting for the broiled walleye and deep-fried cheese curds, it is a balm, so perfectly embodying Wisconsin culture that I can taste in it Packers football, apple fritters, Sorel boots and white pines. You grow up and learn that acceptance can be wonderful.